Anyway, here’s the latest – the next protest at the downtown stations of the Bay Area Rapid Transit will be during the evening drive on Monday, August 22, 2011. (Personally, I think this one will be smaller than the one we had on Monday, August 15th, but who’s to say?)

“The mission of BART, according to BART’s statement, “is to provide, safe, secure, efficient, reliable, and clean transportation services.” So there was the municipal transit agency, exercising its powers to shut down a protest. It’s possible that BART had the legal right to cut off communications inside its stations. It can be argued that the inside of a transit station is an unsuitable place for a mass demonstration.

But the point of the would-be demonstrations was to challenge BART’s judgment in how it used its powers. The protesters were protesting a shooting by transit police. BART’s response showed that it couldn’t even grasp that premise.

What about ordinary commuters, entering the zone of conflict with no access to their own mobile communications? “BART Police officers and other BART personnel with radios were present during the planned protest, and train intercoms and white courtesy telephones remained available for customers seeking assistance or reporting suspicious activity.” The authorities were in charge. The authorities and no one else.

For a day, the measures worked—or in the unknowable world of security counterfactuals, they didn’t not work. There were no disruptive protests during that commute. But BART’s vision of tech dystopia was self-fulfilling. In response to the news of the phone shutdown, the vigilante hackers of Anonymous retaliated by breaking into its database of commuters’ private information and launching a new round of demonstrations, teaming up with the original aggrieved parties. Technology was a dangerous thing after all.”

What’s up with that? Earlier today, people trying to read the SFWeekly got sent to Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, in a way. More precisely, their browsers got sent to Cleveland Scene. Did somebody hack on the pooooor Weekly? Was this some kind of joke against Ohio’s Mistake By the Lake or agin Village Voice Media? Now who would do a thing like that? Thankfully, things are back to normal now.